Some iBook questions

[dougal]

I got my hands on an Apple iBook G3 800mhz with 640mb and running Os x tiger.

Can I run MorphOS on it?

Is it good enough to run 10.5 leopard ?

[strim]

Can I run MorphOS on it?

No. Only eMac and Mac Mini are supported now.

Is it good enough to run 10.5 leopard ?

No, 10.5 needs a G4 machine.

Neverthless iBook is a nice machine.

[amigadave]

You can get later iBook's with a G4 CPU, I forget what the fastest clock speed of the G4 iBook was.

[Daedalus]

My iBook G4 is 1.33GHz and is a lovely little machine, still gives me almost 3 hours on the battery, and cost me a whopping €26!!

[dougal]

The battery is giving me hassles too...  On a full charge, after like 15-20 minutes it down to 85% and once it hits 80% the ibook seems to go to sleep and when i plug in the power cord it wakes up again and shows 0% battery.

[dougal]

I did some exploring on my ibook and found out it actually only has 256mb of ram and not 640mb

Considering its running stuff like OS X Tiger 10.4.11 and iTunes 9.2, latest Firefox etc... its pretty fast

Would upgrading it to 640mb (change the 128mb dimm to 512mb) make a difference as in youtube video playback, loading etc.. ?

Also, the HD is a 30GB... I have a spare pc laptop 120Gb HD which i never ended up using in my A1200. Would the iBook G3 (Dual USB) accept it ?

[strim]

Would upgrading it to 640mb (change the 128mb dimm to 512mb) make a difference as in youtube video playback, loading etc.. ?

Not really, G3 CPU is not fast enough for h264 video streams, complicated flash etc.

Though, adding RAM will make a big difference if you open a lot of tabs in Firefox or use XCode...

Also, the HD is a 30GB... I have a spare pc laptop 120Gb HD which i never ended up using in my A1200. Would the iBook G3 (Dual USB) accept it ?

Never tried, but it should accept 120GB HD.

[tone007]

The battery is giving me hassles too...  On a full charge, after like 15-20 minutes it down to 85% and once it hits 80% the ibook seems to go to sleep and when i plug in the power cord it wakes up again and shows 0% battery.

Worn out battery, very common.  Replacements are cheap.

[djrikki]

Hi all,

Yeah that memory size on the iBook G4 being 256mb sounds low, but back in 2005 when I bought mine that was fine for everything I needed to do.  Until I discovered Native Instruments Traktor DJ Studio, 256mb then become just to little.  Nice little thing, power leads are crap though, I need to buy a 2nd replacement the lead is just too thin it can thread to easy.  May well sell it soon as I have a Mac Mini for portability anyway.

[Daedalus]

Yeah, some additional memory will help having a few apps open, or complicated web pages etc. but as for YouTube, forget it. Even my G4 1.33GHz won't play YouTube videos properly due to the flash plugin not really using the hardware properly. Which is a shame, seeing as I use it for editing full-screen (non-HD) video via firewire with no problems whatsoever.

I've come across that battery problem in some iBooks too - guess I'm just very lucky with mine. Most laptops will start showing battery issues after a few years, Apple are no exception.